Quiet Professionals, Noisy Machinery

When you do this, Sun-Tzu smiles

In a minute, we’ll give you four concrete steps you can take to preserve your guns and your gun rights — and not coincidentally, make Sun-Tzu, the greatest of ancient strategists, smile. But first, an assessment of the position.

We’re under attack, but it’s not unprecedented. It’s just the usual suspects, taking delight in a crisis they won’t let go to waste, frolicking in the bloody shirt. If you’re young you haven’t seen this before. If you’re older, you saw it in the mid-nineties. A little older, you saw the 80s hysteria that led to the Hughes Amendment and the Bush import bans. And if you’re old enough to be throwing junk mail from AARP in the dustbin, you saw it in the 1960s, when a demand to do something! rocked America after political assassinations and race riots seemed to be early outriders of a dawning chaos.

Keep calm and chin up. We shall fight them in Biden’s kangaroo commission, we shall fight them in the Congress, we shall fight them in the courts, we shall never surrender. (And we shall beat them like a rented mule, so we do not need to fight them in all the places described in the original Churchill quote). We are many, we are intelligent, we are articulate, and, most importantly of all, we have reason and right in this fight. They have emotion. As time passes and they continue to wave the bloody shirt to stir emotion, it will become more and more unseemly. And more and more reasonable people will notice that the remedies proposed would not have prevented the crime at issue.

“But,” you ask, “what can I do? I am but one man (or woman). My Congress creature, freshly elected, has no fear of nor interest in me. I cannot reason like a lawyer nor write like a pundit.” That’s all OK. Here are three ways you can add your unique voice to the chorus.

Join the NRA. (You may want to wait on this until Friday’s press conference. If they come out flying the Uncle Fudd flag, throwing some of their members under the bus, you can disregard this one. But we don’t think they will). Here’s a link. If you’re already a member, upgrade to Life, extend your membership, or donate money. The knuckleheads in Washington can’t grasp numbers on a balance sheet or income statement, but they sure as hell are numerate about membership organizations and voters.

Call (don’t write) your Congressman or -woman and Senators and make your voice heard. Faxes and emails go in File 13. We bet you’ve never written your representatives before. Well, now it’s time. You can call the switchboard and find out who it is, if you don’t know. You can get your Senators’ numbers here. You can get your representatives’ here. (If you don’t know which district you’re in, here — unfortunately it doesn’t give you his phone number directly, so you then have to go to the other link. What do you expect? The Government built that). If your representative(s) is/are changing in January, call both the lame duck and the representative-elect. So it might be more calls. The incoming pols may take a little more finding. You will probably get a flunky, or voicemail. Tell them who you are and where you live, so they know you’re a constituent. Tell them in your own words that you oppose gun restrictions, and why. Be calm, reasonable, pleasant, brief and direct. (Alternatively, tell them that you want greater gun restrictions because the voices in your head say it’s not time until there are more gun-free zones).

Write your newspaper. Include your name, address, and phone number (many papers used to call to confirm they’re not being pranked. Some have stopped because of declining staffing). Don’t write the paper that inflamed you with an editorial online, write the one that actually delivers to the neighbors in your street. All the same warnings apply, but also, we underline brevity here. A short single message, and hold yourself to 250 to 300 words or they’ll cut you. Write 700 words — the length of their editorials — and they won’t even read you. Not fair? Maybe, but there it is. Send a real letter and an email in this case. They may be read by different editors, giving you double the chance to get to their readers. Using liberal newspapers to spread pro-gun messages is somewhere between jiu-jitsu an asymmetric warfare. When you do this, Sun-Tzu smiles.

Buy a gun or guns and ammo. This is the most important of the four (and it may be the hardest, as picked-over as shops look right now). This underlines to the politicians that they have lost control of the arms of a free people — if they ever thought they had it in the first place. Don’t know where to buy? This link will find you a dealer. You can also buy at an auction site like GunBroker, and get your gun delivered to a local dealer for pickup (GunBroker maintains a list of local dealers).

Don’t expect immediate results. But as future Senator John Blutarsky famously said, “Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor?”

So give it a week and call a new fire mission on the same targets. What would Sun-Tzu do?

I went to my local indoor range yesterday. Typically, it’s not that busy mid-week, but the lobby/store area was packed, and the normally well stocked cabinets were mostly picked over. Most people here in NE Oklahoma and the other “red” states fully understand what’s going on, and that includes the Congress-critters. It’s the non-gun owning public that is more easily swayed. Those that want immediate action are pandering to emotion and fear, and I believe even they realize that a longer “adult” discussion inevitably involves numbers and other facts, most of which do not support their arguments.

Friend of mine called from CO, his gun shop was cleaned out of everything from Glocks to Barretts that were there on a recent visit. They were 24 hours delayed on “instant” checks. A Fed buddy called from a mid Atlantic region state. He has put $many-k on his credit card in the last few days and only supply has constrained him. The news is full of stories of cleaned out stores and price gouging.

About WeaponsMan

WeaponsMan is a blog about weapons. Primarily ground combat weapons, primarily small arms and man-portable crew-served weapons. The site owner is a former Special Forces weapons man (MOS 18B, before the 18 series, 11B with Skill Qualification Indicator of S), and you can expect any guest columnists to be similarly qualified.

Our focus is on weapons: their history, effects and employment. This is not your go-to place for gun laws or gun politics; other people have that covered.

Why WeaponsMan?

A lot of nonsense is written about weapons, especially on the Net. Rather than rail at the nonsense, we thought we'd talk sense instead, and see how that catches on.